Sustaining Disability Arts Ecologies in Canada

Disability arts is a field of artistic practice and cultural production that is revolutionizing approaches to accessibility and inclusion and providing a critical intervention into Canada’s arts and culture sector. I position this field as an ecology made up of different participants, resources, processes, materials, and networks. My research recognizes an urgent need for disability arts organizations to enact sustainable working practices and administrative infrastructures that can respond to the unique needs and values of the field and support its growth in meaningful ways. My Mitacs project addresses this need for sustainability by focusing on two foundational parts of this ecology: Tangled Art + Disability—Canada’s first accessible and disability-led art gallery and a national leader in accessible curation—and the archival materials of Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology, and Access to Life (BIT)—a community research project that produced an influential lineage of disability arts and culture work. I analyze Tangled’s organizational practices, administrative policies, and networks in relation to BIT’s histories of artistic and cultural production to explore how these infrastructural elements have marshalled the development of the disability arts ecology and how they can be further developed to support the sustainability of the disability arts ecology in the future. This project will support Tangled in assessing their administrative practices, ensuring they are sustainable and aligned with the ethos of disability arts and culture. This will support Tangled in advancing their current strategic planning initiatives by developing meaningful ways of assessing their policies and internal ways of working.

Faculty Supervisor:

Carla Rice

Student:

Partner:

Tangled Art + Disability

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Arts, entertainment and recreation

University:

University of Guelph

Program: